The death camps

The Nazi death camps built in Poland
came to symbolise the depths to which Nazism would go to fulfill Hitler's
dream of a 'master race'. The death camps were very different from the
concentration camps found primarily in Nazi Germany. With the exception that
some of the death camps had 'factory elements' to them, they were no less than
places where mass murder was planned to take place. Such was the scale of these
murders, that no truly accurate figure can be given. One accepted figure is 6
million murders in these camps. However, the Nazis did all they could to destroy
what records existed as to the numbers they knew they had murdered. The
advancing Russian army found that the Nazis had the time to destroy documents
before they fled. The Russians found many documents but the Cold
War meant that they were not available to historians generally.

The most infamous of the
death camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau where
as many as 2 million may have been murdered; Sobibor
where about 250,000 were murdered; Treblinka where
725,000 may have been murdered; Chelmno where 600,000
were murdered; Belzec where 600,000 were murdered andMajdanek
where 235,000 were murdered. Another camp was found in north-west Poland at
Stutthof where 67,000 were murdered. All of these camps were in Poland with four
of them near the Russian border (Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka) while
Auschwitz-Birkenau was in the south-west of Poland while Chelmno was in central
west Poland.

There is no doubt
that the Allies knew about the death camps long before the Russians liberated
Majdanek. Some prisoners did escape from the camps and told the Polishresistance movement exactly what was going on in the camps and this information
was sent to London to the Polish Government in exile who accordingly informed
the Allies.